Bosnian Serbs Begin to Question Price of Victory

By JOHN F. BURNS,

Published: November 14, 1993

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina—
"Thank God that's over," the young soldier said, settling into the passenger seat of a vehicle after it picked him up on a winding road lined with scores of Serbian tanks and guns.

After 15 months as an artillery gunner at one of the Serbian batteries near the "war road" above Sarajevo, the 22-year-old man was reveling in his release from the army of the self-styled Srpksa Republic, the independent state proclaimed on the 70 percent of Bosnia seized by Serbian nationalist troops.

"No more killing, not for me," said the soldier, whose first name is Zoran. "No more pretending we are saving Serbs. Now, a new life as far away from this madness as possible." Repentance Is Rare

In the Serbian gun bunkers, voices like Zoran's are rare -- tortured consciences that speak out only at private moments. Among the Serbian forces that hold Sarajevo in a vise, it is far more common to say that the soldiers are justified in firing heavy weapons at civilians, including the city's 50,000 Serbs, because the ultimate goal is "protecting" Serbs from the Muslims who are the capital's and Bosnia's biggest population group.

But beyond the ranks of the Serbian nationalists' army, police force and unrepentant political leaders, cracks have begun to appear in the facade of solidarity. Like Zoran, growing numbers of Serbs in Bosnia question whether the war fought in their name has brought them "liberation" or simply a share of the disaster that has befallen the outgunned Muslims.

Far from a promised land, what the Serbian nationalists have fashioned for themselves resembles nothing so much as a wasteland, a dreary terrain where most people long for the past and fear for the future. 'Look What They've Done'

"What they have done to Muslims is bad enough, but look what they have done to Serbs," said a middle-aged man who worked as an engineer in Sarajevo before the war and now works in Ilidza, a Serbian-held suburb of the Bosnian capital. The man, who was encountered selling vegetables in an open-air market, spoke in the hurried, anxious tone common among Serbs who speak critically of the Serbian nationalists.

"Look at me," the man said as he carried a sack of potatoes to a visitor's car. "Before the war, I was earning 2,500 marks a month," equivalent to about $1,500. "I had an apartment in Sarajevo, and a house by the sea. Now I am a refugee from my own city!

"I earn a few marks a week in the market. My wife and children are refugees in Serbia, and the authorities here can take me any day to fight at the front, to shoot at Muslims who were my colleagues and friends. Is there anything in this for me?"

For now, the Serbs' discontent appears to focus less on what has happened to Muslims than on the price they have paid themselves. Few on the Serbian side of the war quarrel with estimates by the Muslim-led Bosnian Government and human rights organizations that at least 200,000 Muslims have been killed and more than a million others driven from their homes since the fighting began in April 1992. Serbian losses in the three-cornered war with Muslims and Croats have been lower, perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 killed and 250,000 refugees who have fled to Serbia. 'The Map' Nationalists' Goal Is Almost Realized

The territory that Serbian forces now occupy in Bosnia closely resembles what Serbian nationalist leaders call "the map." A horseshoe-shaped chunk of land, it was identified by Serbian nationalists and military planners in the years before the war as territory that would be seized and eventually annexed to Serbia if Yugoslavia fell apart after the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe in 1989.

Similar maps have been drawn up since the late 19th century as part of the nationalist dream of a "Greater Serbia" in which all Serbs could live under Serbian rule. Today, barring a few surviving Muslim enclaves within the horseshoe at places like Gorazde, Maglaj, Srebrenica, Tesanj, Zepa and Sarajevo, the map of the nationalist planners is more or less complete.

Those gains have allowed Serbian forces to concentrate on tightening the siege and bombarding the few remaining "black spots," as nationalist leaders have called the Muslim enclaves. In the lands the Serbs have already occupied, the Serbian leaders say that their priorities are to set up effective government, pending the day when world opinion allows the territory to be formally annexed to Serbia, and to rebuild the shattered economy.

But visitors who have traveled through the Srpska Republic have been struck by its barrenness. To drive from Sarajevo to Zvornik, on the Drina River border between Bosnia and Serbia, is to cross the heartland of the Serbian-held territories, where towns and villages were emptied of their Muslim majorities by Serbian attackers in the first months of the war.

Today those communities are a vista of empty streets, idled factories and shattered masonry that seem to promise little but lives of miserable subsistence for years to come.

In places like Foca, Bratunac, Rogatica, Visegrad and Zvornik, once-thriving towns where Muslim majorities lived peacefully side by side with Serbs, Serbian police and army commanders rule with what amounts to martial law powers, fostering fear and suspicion reminiscent of the mood in the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war.

Any vehicle with foreign license plates, even one traveling with official Srpska Republic permits, is liable to be subjected to a baggage search that can last hours and include keen-eyed policemen squeezing toothpaste tubes in a quest for secret pouches. Visits to the old Muslim quarters of the occupied towns were forbidden.

In Foca, a police commander denied that the town ever had a 16th-century mosque, even after a reporter produced an old guidebook. Other Serbs said the mosque had been dynamited and the rubble trucked away, leaving the site as a parking lot.

Another reporter, from a London newspaper, was invited to see what a police commander described as the last remaining adult Muslim living in Foca, where the prewar census showed a population of 21,000 Muslims living in the town and the surrounding county. The man, who is married to a Serb, appeared briefly at the window of his home. His wife ushered him quickly away, saying he was unwell.

The reporter was told that the only other Muslims remaining in Foca were five orphans living in pitiful conditions in the town's hospital. Sense of Inequity The Disillusioned Fault Their Leader

It is still too early to say whether the discontent among Serbs will snowball, and impossible to predict what the consequences of widespread disillusionment with the nationalist cause might be. But it already seems clear that Radovan Karadzic, the so-called President of the Srpska Republic, a former Sarajevo psychiatrist who has been the principal spokesman for the nationalists, is deeply unpopular with many Serbs.

In the marketplace in Pale, the mountain town outside Sarajevo that serves as the nationalists' headquarters, a visitor who took an informal poll on support for Dr. Karadzic found some startling results. One woman, clutching five boxes of cigarettes that she said she needed to sell to feed her two children, answered by spitting on the ground and walking away.

Another woman declared angrily: "He's all right, he's got his Mercedes-Benz and one of the biggest houses in Pale, and God knows who paid for them. We did, I suppose. He talks about sacrificing for our future, but the man has paid no price at all."

A man who had been standing nearby walked over, listened to the woman's remarks, and interjected: "Just look at the man. He's put on 20 kilos during the war. Ask yourself, are his wife and daughter waiting for him to come home with scraps of food? No. They're in the lap of luxury."

Discontent is rife, too, among people who work in the government bureaucracy in Pale (pronounced PAH-lay). "Here, have a souvenir," said a spokesman for the government of the Srpska Republic as he delved into the envelope containing his monthly salary and distributed the contents, one 10-billion dinar note at a time, around a group of reporters waiting in the government press office.

At the outset of the war, a 1,000-dinar note was worth about $1.50. Now, a 10-billion dinar note in the Srpska Republic currency is worth about 50 cents. Uneasy Government Tottering Economy And Other Worries

In interviews in recent months, Dr. Karadzic, who is 47, has seemed remarkably ill at ease for a political leader who has accomplished most of the goals he set at the start of the war. Pallid and nervous, particularly when asked about assertions by Western governments that he and his fellow leaders will have to answer for war crimes that Serbian troops are accused of committing, he appears anything but a confident victor.

When visitors ask him if he has anything to say to the families of Muslims who have died in the war, Dr. Karadzic says in effect that Muslims are responsible for the killing, since they voted in a referendum immediately before the war to declare Bosnia independent.

The drive for independence provoked the Serbian onslaught, he argues, by Serbs deprived of the "protection" they had while Bosnia was a republic of Yugoslavia. "I regret every life that has been lost," he said on one occasion. "But it is not the Serbs' fault."

What appears to stir the greatest unease in the Serbian leader is the mood among his fellow Serbs.

Two international peace plans to partition Bosnia have faltered in the last six months, one because it was rejected in a referendum among Serbs in Bosnia, the other because it was voted down by the Muslims who dominate in the Bosnian Parliament in Sarajevo. Dr. Karadzic asserts that any settlement requiring Serbian forces to return territory to the Muslims, even the limited amounts envisaged in the peace plans, would create "1.5 million miserable Serbs" by making it even harder for Serbs to rebuild the economy of the lands they would keep.

The remark overstates the number of Serbs who lived in Bosnia before the war -- about 1.4 million, according to the 1991 census. Serbs made up roughly 31 percent of Bosnia's prewar population, while the Muslims accounted for 44 percent and the Croats for 17 percent.

But by admitting that the future for Serbs in Bosnia could be clouded by having to live in a fragmented territory, Dr. Karadzic has left the impression that even he may have begun to wonder if Bosnia's economy can be made to function again, across ethnic frontiers marked by trenches, machine guns and barbed wire.

By Dr. Karadzic's estimate, the economy of Serbian-controlled parts of Bosnia is functioning at about 18 percent of its level before the war, when Bosnia was an agricultural and industrial bastion of the Yugoslav economy. But even this may be optimistic.

In vast sections of Serbian-controlled territory, the only part of the economy that seems to be functioning at all, apart from ammunition plants and other military enterprises, is a black market in scarce goods like food, fuel and medicines.

Almost all those transactions are restricted to the German mark. Although many families held their savings in marks before the war, they are mostly gone now, leaving many families short of basic essentials though not as deprived as people in cities under Serbian siege like Sarajevo.

Foreigners in towns like Pale, Bratunac and Zvornik are quickly surrounded by children, and sometimes by mothers, appealing for gifts of food or of cigarettes, a scarce commodity that has become a currency in itself. Facade of Unity Risks of Dissent In a Police State

The sense of desperation contrasts starkly with the triumphalism of those who made the war. Newsstands offer glossy photo magazines celebrating the "victories" of Srpska Republic Army units like the Panthers, which spread terror among Muslims while under the command of a notorious officer with the nom de guerre Major Mauser. Captions do not mention that most of the Panthers' victims were unarmed Muslim civilians, targets of what the Serbian nationalists called "ethnic cleansing" at the height of the war.

In graffiti scrawled in the towns seized from Muslim majorities, the war is presented as a victory for Serbian strength and courage. "We are winners," read the legends on jagged walls of burned-out homes that are all that remain of Muslim neighborhoods.

"Nobody beats the Serbs," other inscriptions proclaim. "Now, the world will respect us." Everywhere, there is the Serbian nationalist symbol, in the shape of a shield, inscribed with four Cyrillic S's standing for "Only Unity Saves the Serbs."

The facade of unity seems to be sustained, at least in part, by the heavy-handed actions of the police. Many Serbs who agree to talk with reporters do so only when there is nobody outside their families listening.

One woman in Pale asked a visitor not to talk about political matters in front of her children, for fear that the youngsters, ages 8 and 10, would repeat her critical remarks about the Serbian nationalists at school and prompt a visit from the police.

"The atmosphere here is like Russia in Stalin's time," she said.

The risks of dissent from nationalist orthodoxies were evident when another woman, a Serbian teacher, remonstrated with students in an eastern Bosnia town who had attacked a 15-year-old whose offense was that he, like a third of all Bosnians, was the product of a "mixed marriage" between a Serbian father and a Muslim mother. After the scolding, the teacher was warned by the school principal to keep her opinions on "sensitive political matters" to herself. Perils of Escape Refugees Rejected By Their Own Kind

Even the concern Serbian nationalist leaders profess to feel for Serbs who have become victims of the war often seems feigned.

When Serbs from Sarajevo have succeeded in escaping the city, paying 1,000 marks a head, or about $600, to be led clandestinely across bridges spanning the Miljacka River into Serbian-held territory at night or passing undetected through the military checkpoints of the Bosnian Government Army, they have often met with a chilly, even abusive, reception on the Serbian side of the lines. Frequently their savings are confiscated by the Serbian police, and they have been subjected to hours, sometimes days, of hostile interrogation about their activities in Sarajevo.

Men of fighting age, now considered to be from 18 to 60, have often been taken directly to the Serbian trenches and made to serve as infantrymen, regardless of poor health or a lack of military training. When one man asked why he was being punished by being sent to the trenches on one of the most dangerous stretches, a Serbian police commander laughed at him.

"You stayed with the balija for 18 months," the commander said, using a derogatory term for Muslims that is common among Serbian soldiers. "Okay, let's see how you feel about the balija now. You can go to the front lines and kill a balija, then maybe we'll let you go."

But the ultimate rejection for many Serbs awaits them in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, whose economy has been ruined by international economic sanctions imposed against Serbia in May 1992 for the Serbian Government's role in financing and arming the Serbian nationalists in Bosnia.

One woman with two children reported being turned away by several landlords, one of whom told her: "You Bosnian Serbs made this mess. Now, you can fix it for yourselves."

NEXT: The encircled Muslims.

Photos: The family of Slobodan Lukic, an ethnic Serb who was a victim of strife in Bosnia, attending his funeral earlier this month in the town of Doboj. (Reuters) (pg. 1); A tank operated by Bosnian Serbs passing through the village of Ostojici in August. The village was destroyed in fighting with Muslims. (Peter Gorensky/SIPA Press); Two Serbian soldiers searching a man suspected of being a Muslim last week in the town of Sanski Most. (Associated Press) (pg. 8) Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina (pg. 8)

The writer of this article recently completed a 17-month assignment in Sarajevo.